


So - Friends?

by transkhoshekh



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Platonic Yuri and Otabek, Trans Male Character, Trans Otabek Altin, Trans Yuri Plisetsky, brotayuri, friendship fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-15
Updated: 2017-06-15
Packaged: 2018-11-14 09:36:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11205309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transkhoshekh/pseuds/transkhoshekh
Summary: "And that was how Otabek, figure skating’s most introverted show off, found himself idling his motorcycle in front of a hole in the wall, encouraging Yuri Plisetsky to join him. He told him to come with, straightforward and without dramatics – he was there. Yuri needed help. Otabek hoped he, on some level, understood they were similar and would trust him."ORYuri and Otabek are both trans men. And just friends.





	So - Friends?

**Author's Note:**

> If you comment anything about Otabek and Yuri being involved in a romantic relationship in any capacity, I'll delete your comment. Just don't.
> 
> I haven't written fanfiction in like 5 years, don't be too mean.

He’d never had a hard time spotting other transgender people. It was hard to explain without sounding like he was working with stereotypes, and it wasn’t just that; there was just a certain draw he had to other trans people, a gut instinct he’d learned to trust. 

Being a figure skater helped with all of this, of course – traveling to different countries helped to fine-tune his hunches and see how different people carry themselves and express themselves, both on the ice and off of it. 

Yuri Plisetsky had never outright told him he was trans – Otabek doubted he had told anyone, really. That could ruin his entire skating career, even without malicious intent from fans and media. Hormones would change how his body moved, change how he skated and how his muscles and carried him. Plus, skating with men while open about the difference in your bodies could be uncomfortable for obvious reasons. It could be done, but he wasn’t a second rate-skater that could risk taking a hit - he was a prodigy, already displaying an ability that would give Viktor a run for his money even though he was 10 years younger than him. So it seemed he would strive to be Russia’s youngest prima ballerina before his body caught up to him, so that no matter the fallout, he would always have that.

Otabek understood his fear. It was hard when you got to be this age, because there’s no real way to go and quietly transition. Otabek was lucky – he had worried, when he was coming out loudly at the age of 11, that he would be too afraid to put up the fight required to transition, and that he would be stuck in the same position Yuri found himself in now. 

But instead, he found a stubbornness he hadn’t even known existed beforehand, an admirable trait of subdued willpower. When his parents refused to buy him a binder, he bound with duct tape and ACE bandages until they were worried enough that he came home one afternoon to find a binder on his dresser. When his parents told him to not start hormones, to be patient and see how he felt in a few years, he tried to get them online, and begged older friends for hormones. He ended up with an infection in his thigh from unsterilized testosterone injections, and his parents caved again, more interested in supervision than stopping him. 

He took a risk with his decisions. There was also a fairly real possibility his feelings towards his body and gender would be different as he got older, because some kids with gender dysphoria do change as adults. His parents, mostly, had been scared he would outgrow his feelings and want to grow into the body his ovaries had wanted for him, but he had yet to feel regret. And it felt good to have come out – it felt good to see his body go through the puberty he chose. He wished he could let every trans person now how good that felt, but he knew it was more complicated than that. 

Otabek had recognized Yuri and knew exactly who he was when the skaters arrived in Barcelona, but he was usually not the socializing type, so he hadn’t made an effort to randomly drop in on him and make small talk. Yuri didn’t seem to remember him, being loud and hostile the first time Otabek tried to catch his eyes, and since he didn’t feel as intense a need to socialize as the other skaters, he took that as a perfectly good reason to eat on his own. But he would have taken him, had he shown interest - he didn’t have a particular strong preference for being alone, he just didn’t feel the need to communicate for the sake of communicating, he didn’t like to push. He could be easily amused by his own thoughts, his own company, and music, so he tended towards being one of the more quiet skaters. 

But when he saw Yuri ducking and running from Yuri’s Angels, he finally had a worthwhile reason to say hello. He’d never had that relationship with fans, but he knew that when you had secrets, it could be hard to have that sort of attention – you always sort of felt like you were lying. 

And that was how Otabek, figure skating’s most introverted show off, found himself idling his motorcycle in front of a hole in the wall, encouraging Yuri Plisetsky to join him. He told him to come with, straightforward and without dramatics – he was there. Yuri needed help. Otabek hoped he, on some level, understood they were similar and would trust him.

Yuri looked at the older boy incredulously, eyes full of stress and uncertainty. But when Otabek tossed him the helmet, the decision had already been made. 

**

“Since I met you at that camp, I always thought we were alike. That’s all there is to it - not so complicated, really.” Otabek knew he could be intense, so he’d wanted to go for a walk. More places to look, sights to see – there was less pressure on the both of them.

“So, friends?” 

They shook hands, and Yuri’s felt a bubble in his chest that was different than the normal squeeze of his binder – he felt affection, without any barriers to it, any caveats. No one had ever asked him to be friends before, and he found himself unable and unwilling to be a smartass about it at all. 

They both pivoted so they could return to their positions of on the wall, quietly, with much less tension in the air now that Yuri was less afraid of Otabek’s intentions. They sat in quiet for minutes that stretched on it a way that made it difficult. Barcelona was beautiful – Yuri couldn’t remember another time he had ever been sight-seeing with someone else when he visited a city for a competition. He usually was in a one-track mindset, and that didn’t allow for a lot of wandering. 

“Do you have plans to come out?” Otabek asked, breaking the silence just as Yuri was becoming uncomfortably focused on the limited space his lungs had to expand. He had had his binder on for what was coming up on the 10 hour mark – he didn’t know exactly how long it had been, but running through Barcelona had not been factored into his schedule, so he’d ended up both wearing it longer and doing more strenuous work with it on then he had initially planned.

His eyes widened a little bit and he continued to look towards the landscape, fiddling with his jacket sleeves. Yuri wasn’t decades younger than Otabek (rather, he was around three years younger), but he seemed physically so much smaller when he wasn’t trying to puff himself up. He was on the short side to begin with, and the slouch and clothes that he layered on to hide his chest seemed to dwarf him in a lot of ways. And even from the side, his hair often hung down and obscured his face, giving the impression that he was a little farther away at all times. 

“How do you know I have anything to come out about?” Yuri tried, tentatively. 

“Did you not suspect the same of me, Yuri? I’m not the first trans person on Earth that’s been able to guess that others are trans without being told. I’ve met a lot of people, had a lot of practice.” He paused for a moment, then continued with a smirk, “And you really don’t make it any easier on yourself by having your namesake being in the same bracket as you.” 

Yuri’s cheeks caught on fire, but he managed to choke out a nervous laugh. It had never occurred to him that anyone would make the connection between his name and another popular male skater’s name – when he picked it, Katsuki wasn’t even that well known. 

“You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” Yuri asks, trying to see Otabek’s expression in his peripheral vision without really looking at him.

The older boy snorted; not unkindly, more incredulous. 

“Why would I ever do that? I just told you – we’re the same, you and me.”


End file.
